Orchestral

When asked as a child what her favourite instrument was, Lesley-Jane Rogers would typically respond, “the orchestra!”. The huge variety of colours that an orchestra can offer is a veritable feast, so it will come as no great surprise to learn that Lesley-Jane feels a great affinity for works such as Strauss's Four Last Songs, Canteloube’s Songs of the Auvergne, Finzi's Dies Natalis, Britten's Les Illuminations, Mozart’s Exsultate, jubilate, Bach’s solo cantata Jauchzet Gott, and Ravel’s sumptuous Shéhérazade. To have the orchestral palette available for word-painting the text is her idea of vocal heaven.

Strauss's Four Last Songs is a work Lesley-Jane has performed many times and feels especially attached to. She was delighted to sing them in Chicago together with Strauss’s exquisite song Morgen, and this performance was recorded live and can be heard on this website - to listen, click here.

Another work that has particularly captured Lesley-Jane’s imagination is Finzi’s Dies Natalis, a piece that she has performed a few times, and hopes to sing on many more occasions. Her last performance - in January 2011, with the Oare String Orchestra - received favourable reviews, especially from MusicWeb International. She is also on a personal mission to firmly restore both this work and Britten’s Les Illuminations to the soprano repertory; yes, they were both originally written for soprano, and only later subsumed into the tenor canon!

Lesley-Jane also enjoys the intimacy of chamber music. In particular she relishes matching her voice to individual instrumental colours, especially in new music works. She also has a large baroque repertoire boasting nearly 200 cantatas, including some hundred cantatas by Bach and sixty by Telemann, as well as many works by Handel, Scarlatti, Vivaldi, Purcell and others. However, she is not limited to the mainstream baroque repertoire, having also performed works by more unusual composers such as Caldara, Heinichen, Akeroyde and Ariosti.